New iMac Pro release date, UK price & specs rumours

The powerful new iMac Pro will arrive in December 2017. Here’s everything you need to know, from design and tech specs to UK price and release date

Contents

> iMac Pro release date

> How much will the iMac Pro cost?

> What has Apple revealed about the iMac Pro?

> iMac Pro design

> New features

> iMac Pro tech specs

> Ports & peripherals

Having promised that a professional-grade iMac was on the way back at a briefing in April, Apple has given us a first look at the new iMac Pro, a Space Grey beast of a machine, and promised that it will arrive in December 2017.

In this article we gather all the information available about this powerful new machine, from its clever cooling design and impressive tech specs to its UK price and release date. We’ve got the latest on just how fast the new processors are expected to be, apparent confirmation that the iMac Pro will offer always-on Hey Siri. Plus: Google has suddenly decided the iMac Pro is launching on 18 Dec… but we think it’s got its wires crossed.

Read on to find out more!

iMac Pro release date

The iMac Pro is scheduled to ship in December; Apple hasn’t been any more specific than that, but we’ll let you know when we hear more.

You may have seen the date 18 Dec reported on a few rival sites, but we’d take that with a pinch of salt. To be fair this is a plausible guess – it’s the last week before Christmas, and could be the last chance the company has to launch this year – but we haven’t seen a reputable source or any evidence for this claim.

In fact, we suspect this rumour started because Google’s search spiders crawled Apple’s site and saw the words “December” and “18 cores” next to each other, and jumped to conclusions. Here’s what Google’s widget returns on the search query “imac pro release date” at time of writing:

Hopefully the machine won’t be delayed like the current generation Mac Pro was; in that case it was supposed to be available in December but shipping slipped to January and in some cases February and beyond. We’re still optimistic, though. Apple has pushed back the launch of the HomePod to 2018, and it seems like then would have been the moment to admit if the same thing was going to happen to the iMac Pro.

How much will the iMac Pro cost?

The iMac Pro starts at $4,999/£4,949. That may sound a lot (and is!), but Apple claims that if you built a PC equivalent it would cost $7,000 – and that’s without the display.

Another price comparison that’s a little closer to home: if you add all the build-to-order options to the top-of-the-range 27in standard iMac it tops out at £4,949… In this case, you might prefer to wait for the new machine to launch.

But, of course, it’s important to remember that the £4,949 figure is just a starting price. ZDNet has estimated that a full-spec build-to-order iMac Pro with an 18-core CPU, 128GB RAM, 4TB SSD and Radeon Pro Vega graphics with 16GB HBM2 memory could cost more than £17,000!

What has Apple revealed about the iMac Pro?

Back in April 2017, talking to a small group of journalists, Apple VPs Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi and John Ternus acknowledged that the Mac Pro in its current form hadn’t been meeting the needs of many pro users, and revealed that the company planned to update the iMac to suit them.

“So many of our customers were moving to iMac that we saw a path to address many, many more of those that were finding themselves limited by Mac Pro through a next-generation iMac,” Federighi said.

Apple gave us our first peek at this new professional-grade iMac at WWDC in June 2017. At WWDC the iMac Pro appeared alongside updates to the rest of the iMac range. (If you want to find out more about the new 21-inch iMac, our review of that model is here: 21-5inch 2017 iMac review; and if you want to find out more about the 27-inch iMac, our review of that model is here: 27-inch 2017 iMac review.)

At WWDC Apple revealed that the new iMac Pro will offer the following specs:

18-core Xeon processor with up to 42MB cache

Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz

128GB RAM (DDR4 ECC)

4TBGB SSD

AMD Radeon Pro Vega GPU

From £4,949

Apple has also given Final Cut Pro users a look at the new iMac Pro. The company showcased the new Mac at the Final Cut Pro X Creative Summit in October 2017.

iMac Pro design

The new iMac Pro, when it arrives, will have a new, darker look, shrouded in a Space Grey case.

But it’s not just the outward appearance that’s changed: on the inside, Apple has had to completely rethink the thermal architecture in order to house the new components. The result is a new fan system that offers a claimed 80 percent increase in cooling capacity. Apple says the new system “allows for upgraded internals without making more noise”.

A company spokesperson added: “We reengineered the whole system and designed an entirely new thermal architecture to pack extraordinary performance into the elegant, quiet iMac enclosure our customers love. iMac Pro is a huge step forward and there’s never been anything like it.”

New features

We’ve heard of one new feature that will set the iMac Pro apart from the rest of the Mac line, and that is…

Hey Siri

The iMac Pro will have Siri, as is standard on Macs now, but rumours suggest it will take this one step further and offer Hey Siri. This means the machine will always be listening out for the trigger phrase, and is not a trivial feature to include. (Hey Siri’s demands on battery life, for example, are well known. For some time Apple only allowed Hey Siri to work on iPhones and iPads that were plugged into a power source.)

In fact, it’s understood that the iMac Pro will include a mobile processor – a cut-down version of the A10 Fusion that appeared in the iPhone 7 – on top of its 18-core desktop chipset, dedicated to running Siri and some security features of macOS.

iMac Pro tech specs

Let’s take a look under the hood. Here are the tech specs of the 2017 iMac Pro.

Display – 5K, but not a touchscreen

The 27in iMac Pro will still offer 5,120×2,880 resolution 5K Retina display, like its non-Pro cousin.

As for whether the iMac display will double up as a touchscreen, the answer is no.

Back at the April briefing, Phil Schiller was asked about whether Apple would consider adding a touchscreen display to the iMac. His response was simple: “No”. His colleague Craig Federighi suggested that the iPad Pro offers a far better drawing experience.

Could Apple be planning to increase the pixels of the new iMac Pro display? Or could the new iMac Pro be available in a size larger than 27-inch? We think that there could be a market for either option.

The company has revealed that it is intending to launch a new display to sell alongside it’s Mac Pro, this new display could be even better than the Retina displays on the iMac, perhaps even offering 8K. Read more about the new Apple Display here.

Processor

Apple has revealed that the new iMac Pro will ship with 8-, 10- or 18-core Xeon processors making it the “most powerful Mac ever made”. Apple describes this as “workstation-class performance”, noting the 22 teraflops of GPU performance, fast storage and Advanced I/O.

Xeon chips are better suited to applications involving complex data – such as large, multi-layered Photoshop files, 4K video or 3D scenes with huge textures – as they are generally more robust and reliable than Core chips. They can also use ECC (error-correcting code) RAM, which can prevent errors that could, for example, crash your computer during a long render, explain our colleagues at Digital Arts.

During the keynote Apple talked often of machine learning and other high performance uses, in a bid to emphasis the pro nature of this machine.

The big question is which Xeon processors will Apple be using in the new iMac Pro.

Benchmarks for the soon to launch iMac Pro have appeared, according to reports in late October 2017. Those benchmarks relate to the 3.2GHz 8-core Xeon W-2140B and the 3.0GHz 10-core Xeon W-2150B chip.

The Xeon chips that appear to be being used in the new professional 10-core iMac offer a Multi-Core Score of 35917 in Geekbench 4.1. The single-core score is 5345. This score is faster than the current 12-core Mac Pro.

The 8-core iMac Pro’s average Multi-Core score was 23536.

The 18-core iMac Pro hasn’t been benchmarked yet.

This compares to our tests of the 3.4GHz 27in iMac which scores 14017 in Multi-Core and 4833 in Single-Core, while the 2.9GHz quadcore i7 15in MacBook Pro scored 15731 in Multi-Core and 4739 in Single-Core.

Apparently these first benchmarks do not match Intel’s existing Xeon lineup. It is thought that this indicates that these chips will be custom built – perhaps to offer a lower thermal design, according to Geekbench founder John Poole speaking to MacRumours.

Apple hasn’t actually confirmed the exact processor that it’ll be using in the iMac Pro, but it had been thought that it’ll boast Intel’s Xeon Purley processors based on Skylake architecture, as per this Pike’s Universum article from June 2017.

Pikes Universum found the information within the macOS High Sierra developer beta. Firmware files within the beta reference Intel’s server-class LGA3647 socket, rather than the desktop-class LGA2066 socket. The 3647 socket is the one used by the Purley chips.

However, in November 2017 rumours started appearing that suggest the Xeon chips could be from the newer ‘Basin Falls’ range. Apparently source code in the MacOS High Sierra developer beta lists both the ‘Basin Falls’ and ‘Purley’ code-names.

In July Intel revealed details of 50 Xeon chips, however, those chips don’t match the specs Apple revealed in the WWDC keynote, nor do they match the processors benchmarked above (the 3.2GHz 8-core Xeon W-2140B and the 3.0GHz 10-core Xeon W-2150B chip).

Apple said that the iMac Pro would offer 18-cores and run to 4.5GHz with Turbo Boost but the most powerful Purley chip revealed by Intel maxes out at 4.2GBz with Turbo Boost, according to Mac Rumours.

The most likely explaination is that Intel hasn’t yet announced the relevant Purley chips yet. Another possibility is that Apple will use the next generation of Xeon chips in the iMac Pro. Cascade Lake is set to follow Purley, but it’s not expected until 2018, which might mean Apple would miss it’s deadline of 2017.

Reports also also suggests that the iMac Pro will have Secure Enclave, which means it could have an ARM coprocessor for additional security like the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar already has. In theory the security aspects of this would allow the addition of Touch ID capabilities for the iMac Pro, using a (so far unannounced) peripheral accessory, but that’s pure speculation at this point.

RAM

The iMac Pro will offer 32GB ECC memory as standard, but will be configurable to 64GB or 128GB, according to Apple.

Storage

The iMac Pro will offer a 1TB SSD as standard, but is configurable to up to 4TB SSD.

Graphics

The iMac Pro will offer “advanced graphics editing”, according to Apple, mentioning such uses as virtual reality content creation and real-time 3D rendering.

The iMac Pro will use the Radeon Pro Vega 64 and Radeon Pro Vega 56 graphics cards and will offer up to 16GB on-package high-bandwidth memory. This will be the most advanced graphics ever in a Mac and it will delivers up to an 11 teraflops of single-precision compute power for real-time 3D rendering and immersive, high-framerate VR, says Apple.

AMD is already rolling out some of its Radeon Vega graphics cards – so far the two cards have been released for the desktop PC gaming market – the Radeon RX Vega 64, and the Radeon RX Vega 56. The Radeon RX Vega 64 offers a Base speed of 1,247MHz (air) or 1,406MHz (liquid) while the Radeon RX Vega 56 offers 1,156MHz and 1,471MHz. Those cards have 8GB memory, while the Radeon Pro Vega 64 will have 16GB, so you can expect even better stats from the iMac Pro.

During the keynote at WWDC, Apple went to lengths to demonstrate its eagerness to join the VR revolution. Read more: How to use VR on a Mac

Ports & peripherals

The iMac Pro will boast 10Gb Ethernet, available on a Mac for the first time, and offering up to 10 times faster networking. You’ll also find four Thunderbolt 3.0 ports, which support USB-Type C too.

The latter will enable it to power two additional 5K displays or connect to up to two high-performance RAID arrays.

Keyboard & Mouse

The new iMac Pro will ship with a Space Grey keyboard and trackpad to match its darker design. There had been suggestions that the new keyboard could include a Touch Bar, but as yet none of the prototypes or early models have showed up with this feature.

Speakers

According to Apple the two speakers will deliver “broad frequency response, rich bass, and more volume”.

Want to read more about Apple’s pro-class Mac line-up? Take a look at our Mac Pro 2018 preview. And if you’re thinking of buying a new Mac, read our Mac buying guide 2017 and our Which Pro Mac guide.